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Old 04-03-2018, 12:37 PM   #190
Disco King
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So, some games I've been trying out recently:

Bayonetta- I thought I'd give this one a try to see what a "good" game with button-sequence-combination combat is like, in contrast to the more rhythm-based Arkham-style combat I like. I was hoping to find that I'd enjoy this sort of combat mechanic just as much as the other if done exceptionally well.

Well, I have the exact same problem with it that I have with any other button-combo combat I've had. Can't get the combinations to ever actually work, and it seems like pure chance decides how the game interprets my inputs. As such, I end up just mashing buttons, and doing just fine in the combat, anyway.

I also cannot make heads nor tails of what's going on in this game. The cutscenes are, like, twenty fucking minutes long, yet I'm still no more enlightened about who my character is supposed to be or what her goal even is than before the cutscene began. One guy kept on referencing "Eggman." Is this in the fucking Sonic universe? How come there are no anthropomorphic animals then? Where am I? Where's my medication? The game is just constant disorienting sensory assault.

Mirror's Edge- I absolutely love the visual design, and the selective use of colour to highlight interactive objects and create a tone of a sterile environment. The game looks great. Which makes me wonder why all the cutscenes use SHITTY FLASH ANIMATION THAT LOOKS LIKE IT CAME FROM NEWGROUNDS CIRCA-2004 INSTEAD OF JUST USING THE GAMEPLAY ENGINE.

The game isn't bad, but it's frustrating. I thought I'd get that same feeling of freedom and deft, graceful movement that I get from other games with acrobatic traversal, like Sunset Overdrive and Spider-Man 2. However, I should have anticipated that any game that has map traversal not just as a means of getting between objectives, but as the objective itself, will only be able to make the game challenging by making the traversal challenging. If it were as easy as traversal in games were traversal isn't the only thing the player does, there would be no game.

And while that's understandable, the downside of that is that I never feel like I get any kind of fluid gameplay out of this game, because it's a lot of falling into the same chasm thirteen or fourteen times until you finally get the timing right by total fluke. There are no visual cues for timing, and it's a first-person game for some reason, so it's hard to even know how close you are to the edge of a platform. Also, the controls are... weird. EVERY OTHER GAME IN THE HISTORY OF GAMES USES THE BOTTOM FACE BUTTON (A or X or whatever) to jump. This game makes it a bumper button. And ducking is the trigger right below with using only one side of the controller.

Witcher- I've only gone as far as the tutorial, and I'm already overwhelmed. Why does combat need a dodge button, a different-kind-of-dodge button, and a block button? Don't they all have the same function (avoiding getting hit)? Why make combat more complex than it needs to be? Also, I can't even beat the tutorial guy because he keeps on spamming his shield every time I hit him more than a couple of times? And using that wheel for the special powers in the middle of combat takes too long and I just get hit again?

Also, it looks like one of those games where you have to understand a million different mechanics and keep track of a million different stats. WATCH YOUR STAMINA. COLLECT THIS SHIT TO MAKE THIS POTION IN ORDER TO FIGHT THESE KINDS OF ENEMIES. WHAT TIME OF DAY IS IT? OH HEY YOUR SWORD IS BROKEN, YOU HAVE TO GO FIX IT. HEY RETARD, DIDN'T I JUST TELL YOU TO WATCH YOUR FUCKING STAMINA?!

I think maybe RPG-style games just aren't for me. I don't want to feel like I have to do research just to understand how to play the game. Seriously, the tutorial instructions have, like, Disco-length walls of texts to explain to me how I'm supposed to do shit. Games are supposed to be fun, I may as well just do that fucking homework that I'm procrastinating on if you want me to read all this shit.

L.A. Noire- I'm really liking this one so far. Similar to GTA, but better, IMO. The controls are simpler and more streamlined. Combat is less clunky, but clunky enough to let me believe I'm some 1940s copper instead of a superhero or something, so it's fitting. The visual design and atmosphere is great, even if the faces look like they tried too hard to make them "realistic" and just ended up programming them with the computer-generated equivalent of William Shatner's over-acted facial expressions. Driving feels a lot more fluid than in GTA.

I dig the detective elements. It feels a lot more like I'm actually doing something and being all smart and clever that the detective bits in the Batman games were you just turn on a button to make everything important glow orange and then are able to re-create a virtual recording of a crime by scanning a couple footprints and a bullet hole (detective stuff in Batman games feels too much like being that guy on CSI who yells "ENHANCE" at low-res convenience store security-cam footage). The interrogations, though a fun idea, are poorly executed, because the response options are so vague that it's impossible to know which one is the sensible choice.

Very soon, I will be trying out Mass Effect, Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, and Dead Space.

Also, I downloaded the newest GTA because it was on sale, so I'll see if I like it better than the previous one.

 
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